Student Work

Fine Arts (BFA)

Kerry Lessard

A Violence so Profoundly Felt

The dismantling of my family’s “American Dream” is a theme that continues to fuel my practice of painting. Each painting depicts places and people affected by the abuse of methamphetamines in small town America. Insidious drug culture and the deterioration of the psyche due to mental illness are materialized in my work through the use of hazy portraiture and dismal landscapes. I strive to capture a hushed violence that has consumed my relatives—a violence felt so profoundly in the seedy motel rooms of Dixville, New Hampshire, tucked quietly into forgotten photographs of ancestors, and found on desolate back roads of Eastville, Arizona.